TikTok was fined $600 million on Friday for improperly transferring European users’ personal data to China, marking a flashpoint in the West’s effort to split the app from its Beijing-connected owners.
The fine, imposed by the Irish Data Protection Commission, comes about a year after former President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that ordered ByteDance to sell its ownership in TikTok within 270 days or have the app banned in the United States. However, the app remains available for millions of Americans of all ages to this day.
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President Donald Trump extended that deadline on his first day in office and did so again last month, continuing to allow Americans to use the social media platform while it still tries to reach a deal for ByteDance to sell its stake in the company.
The push to force the sale from ByteDance is due to national security concerns regarding the company’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party and whether data the app collects on Americans could be used against the U.S. About two years ago, the app said it had 150 million American users.
Trump’s willingness to delay enforcing the law is “weakening rather than strengthening” the U.S.’s posture in these negotiations, Daniel Lyons, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “It needs to be a credible threat.”
On Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order pushing the January deadline for TikTok to divest to April 5. A day before it was set to expire, he extended it for another 75 days.
The entities nearly had a deal finalized prior to the current extension, but ByteDance ultimately informed the Trump administration that it could not agree to the sale after the president held “Liberation Day,” in which he rolled out tariffs on foreign countries, including China.
“If these national security concerns are real, and they are, then it’s not in America’s best interest for the White House to continue dragging this out, I think they should bring the issue to a conclusion sooner rather than later,” Lyons added. “If ByteDance is going to continue to hold out and say, ‘Don’t divest,’ then really, the only option available under the law is to impose the ban.”
The decision not to enforce the ban and take the app offline in the U.S. “is a political calculation,” because it will be “politically unpopular,” he concluded. “If the administration is correct, actually believes the argument made in court, that this is a significant national security concern to justify the ban, then they should be willing to pay the political penalty of going forth with the path that the Supreme Court has now blessed.”
The fact that European users’ data was stored in China represents, to some extent, the realization of the fears many who support the ban have — that Beijing can access all that data from hundreds of millions of users across the globe.
TRUMP EXTENDS TIKTOK SALE DEADLINE FOR ADDITIONAL 75 DAYS
“TikTok’s personal data transfers to China infringed the [General Data Protection Regulation] because TikTok failed to verify, guarantee and demonstrate that the personal data of [European Economic Area] users, remotely accessed by staff in China, was afforded a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the [European Union],” DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said.
According to a statement, TikTok had erroneously told the DPC “throughout the inquiry” that it did not store user data on servers in China. However, in April, TikTok informed the DPC that personnel had discovered in February 2025 that limited data had, in fact, been stored on servers in China.